


Temple of Thought

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Wolf's Rain
Genre: F/M, Past Life Memories, Post-Canon, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23501581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Kiba spends all the time that he can spare on dreams of flowers.
Relationships: Cheza/Kiba (Wolf's Rain)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Temple of Thought

Almost as if it is a responsibility nowadays, Kiba spends all the time that he can spare on sleep.

It is due to the dreams; they feel important.

He doesn't have a clue why.

In them, he is alone. The dreams have no plot. The space they occupy is minimal, and he isn't even entirely certain how they make him feel, from an emotional standpoint.

They do, however, have the striking consistency of all placing him under a night sky in a vast field of moon-white flowers.

They're always the same kind.

He can tell this, even though the flowers do not look the same across any two consecutive dreams. One rest, they will have the porcelain-leaf trumpet shapes of lilies; in the next, the firework shape of chrysanthemums. In the next, snowflake shapes. Then they will be lilies again.

He can tell because the smell is always the same.

It isn't anything he has smelled before, quite - it smells of a soft rain in woodland, but without the rotten-earthy undertones of sloshing mud and dampening moss; it smells of vanilla, but far more remote and removed from vanilla's bakery-warm temperature. He can tell the smell is consistent even when nothing else about the flowers is because it lingers in his conscious mind when he stirs awake in the shadows of buildings - holds him in a space of cool and clear before his senses, inevitably, resychronize with his surroundings, and the impression of the scent of flowers is blown out by the city air and its chemical wetness.

Smell, he knows, is a powerful thing; it is to the scent that he ascribes the importance. He sleeps not to escape any real thing, but to memorize the scent. To contemplate it - identify whether, perhaps, he is nostalgic for a place he has forgotten and needs to recall, or if the scent and whatever components his mind has merged into something new is some sort of riddle he needs to solve, at the heart of which is some key to inner peace.

The immediate world does not feel nearly as worth studying enough for him to truly think of it as he passes by storefronts, a battered black bag slung over his shoulder and stuffed with water bottles and jerky and a bedroll. He is still tuned into sense memory - recreating a dream flower field around him to walk through, trying to keep the smell fresh in his mind.

He nearly collides with the girl who emerges from a boutique. She makes a soft yelping sound and pauses; he does, too, unalarmed, stepping back reflexively. He makes eye contact and he sizes her up, in her red cloak and lavender blond hair and rich red eyes, as a matter of formality; acknowledgement. They linger on the black dog she has on a lead. The dog sniffs his pant leg. His eyes travel back up to the girl's face.

She laughs and smiles, and she lifts the lead, and whispers to the dog to come on. They round him as he stands put, waiting for a wandering turning needle in his head to point him in a new direction to take through his imaginary unchanging field, simply to keep his system roaring and, at the top of it, his mind sparking.

In the draft off the wake of that red cloak sweeping past him, the air smells of flowers.

The needle begins to turn to keep its tip firmly on her.

He half-turns to watch her pass, proceed down the street. Drizzle is beginning to fall, sparkle through the air. She pulls her hood up; the dog begins to wave its tail like a flag.

Kiba stands, continuing to soak in the wake of the scent.

The field does not wilt but rather melts around him.

And it is out of instinct that he takes one first ready step after another, following that wake to stay within it, trailing the essence of those dreams's first emergence into immediacy, now needing to be wakeful.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the r/FanFiction April Daily Prompt challenge. April 5th: "Dream Sequences. What Is Your Character's Subconscious Trying To Tell Them?"


End file.
